How Baselined works
One editorial rule, one scoring rubric, and a list of the things this site will not print. All of it is here so you can hold us to it.
Baselined covers project-management certification for people deciding whether to pursue one. It is written by one small editorial desk, it is funded by links to training providers, and it is built around a single rule.
The rule
A rule comes from the body that issues the certification. A price comes from whoever charges it. Nothing else counts, and everything carries the date it was read.
In practice that means PMI for the PMP, CAPM and PMI-ACP; Scrum Alliance for the CSM; the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for pay. A training provider is quoted for its own price and for what it says about itself — never for what PMI requires.
This is not pedantry. On 24 September 2026 we read two large PMI Authorized Training Partners’ PMP pages. One stated that project experience must fall within the past eight years; PMI’s current rule is ten. The other had the window right but listed two of PMI’s four eligibility routes, omitting exactly the routes that shorten the experience requirement. Both were reproducing a PMI document that had been superseded.
What that rule makes us leave out
- No PMP or CAPM pass rate. PMI publishes none.
- No passing score. PMI says only that it is determined by psychometric analysis.
- No PMP exam fee. PMI states that fees vary by membership status and region and shows you yours after your application is accepted. There is no public figure to quote.
- No salary figure except PMI’s own claims, attributed as claims, and the BLS occupation median, dated.
- No Scrum.org data. Its pages returned a bot-protection challenge on 24 September 2026, so nothing from it appears here.
- No marketplace course prices. They are promotional and regional almost continuously, and a stale price on a certification page is worse than none.
Every one of these is recorded, with its source and the day it was checked, in the site’s own facts file — and where a figure could not be verified, that is recorded too.
The rubric behind every score
Where a page scores a product out of ten, the ten points break down like this. They are judgements, not measurements, and half-points get explained on the page that uses them.
| Part | Points | What earns them |
|---|---|---|
| Does the job it is sold for | 3 | For a course: 35 hours PMI will accept. For a question bank: practice at the real format and length. |
| Price published in full | 2 | One currency, no countdown clock, renewal terms on the same page |
| Contents match the claim | 2 | What you receive is what the sales page described |
| Still correct about PMI’s rules | 2 | The provider’s summary of eligibility and training matches what PMI currently publishes |
| How long access lasts | 1 | Stated plainly, with what renews and when |
Only two things on this site carry a score: Coursera’s Google Project Management Certificate and PMI’s Study Hall Essentials. Certifications themselves are never scored, because a credential is not a product with a price and a term — it is a standard, and rating it out of ten would be a category error.
How this site makes money
Some links to training providers are affiliate links: KnowledgeHut, Simplilearn, Coursera and Udemy. If you buy after following one, we may be paid. Those links are marked as sponsored, they are declared where they appear, and the full arrangement — including who we refuse to link and why — is set out on the affiliate disclosure.
Two consequences are worth stating here. PMI runs no affiliate programme we could verify, so every PMI link on this site earns nothing — and PMI’s own 35-hour course is still the first recommendation on the PMP certification training page, because it is the one route an auditor cannot argue with. And where the honest answer is “you may already hold the hours, buy nothing”, that is what the page says.
What we are not
Not affiliated with PMI, Scrum Alliance, Coursera or any training provider. Not a training provider ourselves. Not able to tell you whether you will pass, because nobody can. PMP, CAPM, PMI-ACP and PMBOK are marks of the Project Management Institute and appear here only to name its certifications.
If you find something on this site that has gone stale or was wrong when we wrote it, tell us — the date on every figure exists so that you can.